It is hard to ignore a book with the word orgasm in hot pink emblazoned across the cover. It reminded me of an article I saw recently in the Weekend Australian about couples who choose to refrain from sex before marriage. It seemed to me a strange choice considering all the work that has been done to move cultural values in the opposite direction.
In this hotly-pink new title Orgasm and the West, Robert Muchembled charts the history of sexual pleasure and repression that is fundamental to Western culture. He argues that in the tension between self and community, sexuality has been manipulated by state and religion from the very beginning of Western society. His work adds to Michel Foucault's 1970s 3-volume seminal text on the subject: The History of Sexuality. Interestingly, Muchembled also argues that the European attitude to sexuality has evolved more openly than the American one since the 60s, due to the continued influence of a puritan hangover in the States.
Female sexuality has certainly been an area of interest across the genres, since the wave of feminism in the 70s saw the publication of Germain Greer's The Female Eunuch and among other's Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden. Biographies of women in the sex trade particularly have seen an increase over the last few years - God's Callgirl, In My Skin and The Intimate Adventures of a London Callgirl (which was recently also made into a film) - atrract a lot of media and public attention.
Fictional and not-so-fictional accounts of sexual romps are always popular, such as Nikki Gemmell's The Bride Stripped Bare and the new book by Charlotte Roche, Wetlands, which has caused a sensation in her native Germany and remains high on our list of bestsellers.
Interestingly, it has been harder to find male versions, perhaps it is because their sexuality is taken more for granted. There titles are also much more explicit - The Great Cock Hunt; Rent Boys; Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz - titles that never hang around, or seem to spark the interest that the women's ones do.
In the scientific arena Bonk by Mary Roach, traces the history of scientific research on sexuality and Natalie Angier's new book Woman: An Intimate Geography, reveals, among many other fascinating details, that the clitoris-with 8,000 nerve fibers packs double the pleasure of the penis
On a more personal level, The New Joy of Sex, the original I remember seeing about the place in the 70s, continues to sell well, as do other titles such as A Passionate Marriage and Bettina Arndt's Sex Diaries - where she collected tales of the sexual negotiations between ordinary Australian couples.
And if you like your porn with a little more humour, there is always the the Pop-Up Book of Sex or the Cambridge Women's Pornography Collective's, Porn for Women - pictures of bronzed studs vacuuming and doing other household chores, hmmm, maybe that doesn't really count, although it might be useful for all those who have decided that abstainance is the way to go.
